David P. Brunski, passed away Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009, after a brief battle with brain cancer.  He is survived by three grandchildren, Foster Hudson, and Lily and Audrey Howard.

 

how strange,

to be printed next to death, tethered to a man i barely knew.

only in stories:

bursting through the door in search of me, as a baby,

naively dreaming in my mother’s arms.

“where is my grandson!” was the booming call, the foghorn

chasing after my brown gleaming eyes.

i was transported to the land of his hairy, muscular forearms,

and left there under his watch.

he would gaze at me for hours, and when I was put to bed,

crawling in my palace of dreams, he told my mother

i was going to be an artist.

 

what clairvoyance

for a man who chastised me on a mini golf course:

seven-year old me, aping the golfers at the masters

my father forced me to watch. perhaps

he was angered by the presumption

that i was in competition

for that green jacket. or perhaps

it was the misunderstanding, the unused intellect

that could not see the difference between this dinky course

and the lush emerald 18-hole. perhaps he was doing me a favor,

recognizing misguided athletic tendencies and

squashing them before they could ferment,

suffocating my fragile artistic soul.   

 

his strength,

so unlike his sensitive, poetic kin, was his pride.

number twenty-seven for the red back raiders,

he would scare away the competition with his calf-lifts,

pulling all the weight the machine would hold with just one leg.

playing until the cancer chained him to the bed, his hockey games

were a colosseum of battle cries and shoulder-bashing.

the Brunski name was nothing if it wasn’t proud, as i could see it,

even if my frail lanky body was a shadow in the legacy of

a construction-worker’s wake.

 

dying,

my grandfather flirted with the nurses. a lion song

refused to die in his breast unless it took him with it,

and when he passed i had nothing to compare it to:

mourning was not yet in my nature, so i had no sense

of what was lost. “obituary” was missing

from my vocabulary, and as the dust settled and the months turned to years, my grandfather’s mural filled out in my memory.

 

perhaps if i had known

that my name would appear

under my grandfather’s

in the newspaper,

i would have paid more attention.